Some New Semester 2 Work

All Natural - oil on birch panel, 20" x 30"

And a close up:

Alcyone - oil on birch panel, 18" x 18"

Close-up:

In my very recent visit with Emily, we both agreed that this was a successful venture into creating facture on the painting surface. It was highly experimental for me, but I was able to develop a decent technical facility with bigger, juicier marks of paint in a fairly short period. The use of panels rather than canvas was a big help, as the paint truly sits up on the primed birch, as opposed to sinking into the weave (and more absorbent commercial primers) of stretched canvas. I'm proud of the fact that when it came to using just pure layered wet-into-wet paint, I stuck with large (#12 and up) bristle brushes, and kept the blenders in a drawer. The only blending (purposely done) was the no-texture cloud background of All Natural.

Again, as far as discussing conceptual aspects, I have to leave that between Emily and me, and give full disclosure at my Group 3 residency in January. I am happy to tell that Emily felt these were very solid pieces as far as the direction I'm looking to go conceptually. Let's go out on a limb here and say that things are slowly coming together.

Study/Experiment With New Materials

Here's a study for a much larger work. This "study" is 24" x 24" already, but I needed the working room for the new materials. I used tar (roofing tar, specifically), enamel (Rustoleum, almond color), some VanDyck Brown and mineral spirits. Most of this is painted with chemical-proof gloves, not brushes. And lots and lots of rags! These materials are hard as hell to work with and fairly counterintuitive to the normal opaque-medium painting process. There's some surface concerns in terms of the way it sets up, and I may introduce some shellac, but we'll see in a few days when it stabilizes. Oddly enough, other than the possibility of the enamel being a bit brittle, the tar compound will be nice and flexy, so I'm fairly confident it won't explode on me.

When I finish the final work, I'll elaborate on my intentionality, but you can probably guess why I'm using petroleum-based products for this subject matter.

New Work

Atelier 2010 - oil on canvas, 24" x 24"

Flyover - oil on canvas, 24" x 36"

Pteronychus - oil on canvas, 12" x 12"

Not a great deal of quantity, but this past semester was more about searching for new ways to conceptualize and deal with my art in a more critically rigorous manner. If you go to the post "Works In Progress", you'll see that a lot of what I was working on I was conceptual experimentation. Using the examples of that post, you can see I was attempting to apply pure allegory in order to develop narrative. I essentially abandoned all of those strictly allegorical (and very layered/coded) concepts save one sketch, which I modified and simplified to make "Atelier 2010."

I will be posting a Residency 2 summary very soon, as well as a quick post about my new mentor.